Spurned by today's music fans, the '80s broke new ground and is under-rated, argues Justin Norrie.

Two trailer park girls go 'round the outside,'round the outside, 'round the outside. Eminem, Without Me

When the virtuoso rapper included this lyric in his 2002 hit, it wasn't just meant to be autobiographical social commentary. Eminem was subtly, maybe unconsciously, paying tribute to the most deeply misunderstood decade in popular music. It sounds like a stretch, but it's pretty straightforward, really.

The lyric comes indirectly from Malcolm McLaren's 1982 single, Buffalo Gals, the first big hit to feature "scratching", and the earliest authentic effort by a white person to expropriate hip-hop culture. Although white New York rappers the Beastie Boys caused a bigger stir five years later, McLaren was first to smooth the way for Eminem's rise to world domination.

The '80s were like that. They altered the natural order, and not just by setting new standards for execrable synthesiser-pop that stood until Savage Garden began recording years later.

Retro clubs endlessly celebrate the decade's predilection for kitsch and camp - in witless hits like Mickey, by Toni Basil, Black Lace's Agadoo, and just about any New Romantic number. But a closer look at the decade reveals a little-known and startling truth: that '80s pop groups were more experimental and diverse than at any other time in the half-century history of modern pop music; and that their legacy reaches far beyond one-hit-wonder compilations and reformation tours.

While Michael Jackson's 1982 record, Thriller, was becoming the biggest-selling album ever, and Madonna was churning out desiccated dance numbers like Lucky Star, a flux was propelling developments beyond the charts - in hip-hop, electronic music and independent rock.

For the most part it was reactionary. By agitating against the music industry's stifling commercialism, the conservative mood of world politics and corporate greed in the West, pop groups produced an enormous output of culture-shifting music. And with the help of developments in technology, they took punk to its logical conclusion by placing a premium on artistic expression at the expense of training and technique.

Top albums of the decade:
The Smiths The Queen Is Dead
The Pixies Doolittle
Public Enemy It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back
The Stone Roses The Stone Roses
New Order Power, Lies and Corruption

Perhaps the decade's greatest legacy was the transformation of hip-hop from a nascent New York scene into a political tool and worldwide youth movement. Hip-hop artists like the Sugar Hill Gang and Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five had already achieved success by 1980. Ironically though, it took the entrepreneurial skills of McLaren, an old art-school huckster and the svengali manager of the Sex Pistols, to prick the public consciousness outside the US with Buffalo Gals.

McLaren once described his 1982 hip-hop album, Duck Rock (which included Buffalo Gals), as a harbinger of the rap explosion in the mid-to-late '80s - a highly dubious claim, although the melding of styles on the album did presage the rock/hip-hop fusion in Walk This Way, the 1986 hit by Run DMC and Aerosmith, and the Beastie Boys' debut of the same year, Licensed To Ill, the first rap record to go to number one in the US.

As hip-hop's "golden age" got underway, the genre became a platform for more hardline political views. Public Enemy rapper Chuck D famously shouted on Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos: "I got a letter from the government the other day/I opened and read it/It said they were suckers/They wanted me for their army or whatever/Picture me giving a damn - I said never." On the West Coast, abrasive rappers N.W.A. (Niggers With Attitude) were trying to subvert authority with bites of spasmodic rage like F--- Tha Police, but had greater success ingratiating themselves with white, middle-class males.

Technological developments had given musicians useless accoutrements like drum pads, headless basses and keyboard axes (keyboards held like guitars). But they also loosened the grip of record labels on the industry, allowing DJs to experiment with techno and house music. Many took inspiration from German electronic outfits Kraftwerk and Neu!, as well as English group New Order, whose 1983 single, Blue Monday, was an innovative blend of robotic vocals, lush synthesisers, liquid bass, and cutting-edge drum-machine rhythms. Its ascetic quality - taken to the extreme by the taught, pounding slabs of noise from industrial bands like Cabaret Voltaire - represented a rejection of '80s indulgence. The youth market shelled out for more than 3 million copies to make it the highest-selling 12-inch record of all time.

For the first time since punk had been absorbed into popular culture, guitar bands began to break away en masse again. The Smiths, the Replacements, REM and Australia's the Go-Betweens headed a vanguard of independent acts (so-called for their disassociation with major labels, or by virtue of their DIY attitude) that created an "alternative" ethos in pop music and a fragmentation in conventional guitar-based music.

Although they fell apart after just a few years, the Smiths' provided the British guitar-rock blueprint for the next decade and roused every other college student in Christendom to buy a second-hand guitar and get wistful. Oasis' Noel Gallagher once recalled: "When the Smiths came on Top of The Pops for the first time, that was it for me. From that day on I wanted to be Johnny Marr."

While Marr's unique guitar work provided the band's arresting sound, it was Morrissey's forlorn ramblings about life in dreary England under Margaret Thatcher that set the Smiths apart.

Black Francis, the portly singer of Boston's 80s indie-rock heroes the Pixies (currently re-formed for a world tour), was a devoted follower and even copied Morrissey's quiff at one time. In turn the Pixies pioneered the jagged clamour and stop-start/soft-loud dynamics that inspired the Seattle-based grunge bands of the '90s, and more recently, Australia's own tortured souls, the Vines. Shortly before he committed suicide in 1994, Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain said of Smells Like Teen Spirit, his anthemic 1991 single: "I was basically trying to rip off the Pixies. I have to admit it."

It's no coincidence that the grunge movement rose from the swampy guitars and Neanderthal tub-thumping of Seattle bands the Melvins and Mudhoney at the same time the Pixies were releasing their best work - in the late '80s - years before Teen Spirit was hijacked and turned into a jingo for teflon-coated teen angst. Along with hardcore, straight-edge punk (whose proponents declared drugs and casual sex anathema), and emocore (aka "emo": deeply earnest, emotive punk), early grunge was the most direct expression of anti-establishment, deconstructed and unaccomplished guitar music.

Eventually, corporate endorsement of the Seattle sound hastened the demise of lumbering '80s hair-grunt groups Bon Jovi, Poison, Warrant and, Guns 'N' Roses, who managed in 1987 to get out one sublime big-rock moment - Appetite For Destruction - before collapsing into the splayed-leg solos of November Rain.

Hard rockin' was less a preoccupation among Britain's youth in the 80s. Perhaps in reaction to the sense of hopelessness that Thatcherism imbued, or maybe just to align themselves with the gloomy English climate, many teenagers put boot polish in their hair, white powder on their faces, Dr Martin boots on their feet, and played goth rock requiems on their guitars. The Sisters of Mercy - a bunch of wags from Leeds who cheekily named themselves after an order of Catholic nuns - wrote cheery songs about themes like pain, blood and death. In 1988, Australian expatriate Nick Cave conceived his masterpiece, The Mercy Seat, a self-portrait by a prisoner on death row. And "shoegazer" bands like the Jesus and Mary Chain and My Bloody Valentine, distantly related to the goths, stood on the spot and stared impassively at their gym boots through hours of droning guitars, feedback and crashing cymbals.

The humble rock song looked in danger of slipping into an endless, shapeless dirge.

But just in time, tectonic changes in world politics lifted the pall. As Cold War barriers fell across Europe, Mancunian scallies the Stone Roses and their monkey-man messiah Ian Brown restored pop classicism firmly to favour and brought fun back to the pop music spectrum. The '60s-inflected guitar sound and rhythmic shuffle of the Roses' 1989 eponymous debut and follow-up single, Fools Gold, sent the world into raptures and brought the focus of the market briefly but squarely on Manchester. Across the city a movement dubbed "Madchester" was building, culminating in the acid-house rhythms, melodic pop and psychedelic flourishes of the Happy Mondays' 1990 record, Pills 'n' Thrills and Bellyaches.

Where before youth culture had wallowed in disenchantment and angry subversion, it now embraced the mindless, ecstasy-fuelled trip that accompanied the imminent end of the Cold War.

The scene lasted less than two years but the hangover wore on through the 90s. And by the time the Happy Monday's drug-addled frontman Sean Ryder was snacking on tubs of Hagen-Dazs ice-cream for breakfast, dance culture had evolved from its happy-tribe rave roots into the massive Ministry of Sound franchise and innumerable sub-dance genres.

The '80s had succeeded in completely breaking down the pop music conventions passed on since rock'n'roll shocked the world in the '50s. The same people who had opposed the deregulationist policies of arch-conservative governments had pushed hardest for the deregulation of the pop music paradigm.

Perhaps in the far-off future, when the world finally forgives the '80s for Stock Aitken Waterman, MTV and Motorhead-badged Darlinghurst hairdressers, opportunistic pop bands will honour the decade's finer points with a new round of revivals.

Then may the era unfairly typecast by fashion fopperies and albums like MC Hammer's Please Hammer, Don't Hurt 'Em! (released in 1990, to be accurate) inherit its place at the top of the pop music pantheon.